Saturday is just jam-packed with rematches of serious, serious action fights, a couple of them still fogging up your television screen with controversy from the first time around. Over on HBO pay-per-view, in one of the controversial ones, we get a do-over of Antonio Margarito-Miguel Cotto, a bout tainted and/or enhanced by the suspicion that Margarito had loaded gloves the first time around and by the potential that Margarito’s gruesomely reconstructed eyeball might explode. For now, is this space, we’ll save that for later and concern ourselves with the sequel to the controversial Abner Mares-Joseph Agbeko bout over on Showtime, the first fight an echo of Norm MacDonald’s famous joke after the O.J. Simpson verdict: “Well, it’s finally official: Low blows are legal in the state of California.”
The galling thing about Russell Mora’s refereeing job back in August — actually, there were a lot of galling things about it, all of them reaching a crescendo when Mora stared directly at Mares’ cockpunch in the 11th and ruled it a fair knockdown — is that it distracted from what was a very good fight that could have given us a satisfactory conclusion to Showtime’s excellent bantamweight tournament. Instead, all anyone could talk about was the cockpunching and wonder, “What if Mora had done his job?”
We are on the verge of having to wonder no longer.
So, can Mares win a well-officiated fight with Agbeko? Remember, there was also a bunk knockdown call in the 1st round. Mares also never was penalized for low blows, as he should’ve been at some point in the fight, and maybe an Agbeko who isn’t pissing blood fights with a bit more vigor and wins some close rounds. Even a marginally better-officiated bout might have ended in a draw or Agbeko win, in other words.
Mares certainly has the talent and grit to win. He won a good number of rounds against Agbeko fair and square; he beat Vic Darchinyan even with a point deduction for low blows; and he deserved the win over Yonnhy Perez that was ruled a draw. It’s an impressive resume for a 26-year-old. He’s done it with a good boxer-puncher/body attack/pressure-fighting style, toughness and a bit of smarts. Against Darchinyan and Perez, he had to dig himself out of a bit of a hole both times, and he figured it out successfully.
